Matt has bought The Tangent project to my attention.

It is a new headquarters for Hyundai by Daniel Libeskind. On his website, Daniel explains why it is called the Tangent Building:

‘The Tangent is a project that is about the relationship between the ever changing circle of nature and the straight line of technology. In the contact between the circle and the line, one can see the meeting between the wheel and its path. Through their mutual engagement, nature gives reality to machines and machines extend nature to new and unknown horizons.’

Disregarding the rubbish about circles representing nature and pushing to the side, just for a moment, the fact that Moore’s Law has predicted accurately that technology follows an exponential curve rather than a straight line, I would like to talk a little about elementary geometry. The stuff you learn when you first go to Big School:

In the image above on the left we have a circle and on the right we have a line. This is easy and we probably learnt it before big school. We are interested in what happens when the two combine though. Lets have a look.

Here we have on the left, a line crossing through a circle. This is called a chord. On the right, however, we have a line that juuuuuust touches the circle ever so lightly. So lightly in fact that the point where the two touch is infintely small! This is called a Tangent* and is the namesake of the Hyundai Corporate HQ.

So we can see that the Tangent building in fact contains no tangents. Which begs the question, if you are going to post-rationalise a design, why not make the explanation at least partly relevant to the scheme? It is lazy and insulting to assume that if you throw enough catchphrases and buzz words in the air, people will be dazzled by your genius and not ask any questions.

Others have written much more clearly on the misuse of words so I will allow Mr Orwell to finish up for me:

“The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as “keeping out of politics.” All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.”

* A fun fact about tangents is that a line drawn from the centre of the circle to the point where the line meets the circle is perdincular to the tangent!

[UPDATE] Okay. Some readers have pointed out that there is, in fact a tangent present in the Tangent Building. See that enormous white shard crashing through the left hand side of the building? Well apparently it is a tangent to the circle on the facade. Whatever.